How can I download all the data from iCloud?

I have around 45GB of data on iCloud, and the excessive number of very few files at the root level of the cloud drive makes `bird` (the macos drive sync agent) go crazy and not sync anymore. I don't see any command line tools (rclone has an open ticket from 2017 that's 5 years ago: https://github.com/rclone/rclone/issues/1778) or "downlad all" from the iCloud portal. Any ideas? Please help.